New leadership guides Virginia Tech Publishing toward the future

Corinne Guimont, associate director of publishing and digital scholarship, will lead Virginia Tech Publishing, the university’s digital-first open access publisher, in its mission to share Virginia Tech scholarship openly and broadly. She is excited to build upon the foundational work of Peter Potter who began Virginia Tech Publishing in 2017.

“We have always aimed to be collaborative and innovative in our publishing efforts, and I’m looking forward to finding ways we can continue to do so,” said Guimont. “With my background in digital scholarship work, I’m particularly interested in applying more traditional publishing practices like peer review, copyediting, and design to complex web-based projects and to look at ways we can preserve the scholarship from those projects long-term.”  

Recently, Virginia Tech Publishing expanded its team to meet the growing demand for book and digital scholarship publishing by Virginia Tech authors. This directly contributes to university efforts to increase global dissemination and impact of Virginia Tech research and scholarship. 

Since arriving at Virginia Tech seven years ago, Guimont has served Virginia Tech Publishing in open educational resources, digital humanities, digital scholarship, and digital publishing to craft the solid building blocks to support and publish more complex digital projects.

Guimont holds a bachelor’s degree in English centered on digital humanities and a master’s degree in information science focused on digital preservation and archives. She also has experience in commercial textbook publishing in digital content management.

Virginia Tech Publishing is known for its commitment to increasing the visibility, reach, and impact of research produced at the university. Everything it publishes is open access, which means it’s freely available online or a print edition is available at cost through a third-party vendor.

“Being embedded in the library allows us to provide both publication opportunities for the Virginia Tech community and consulting on external publishing opportunities,” said Guimont. “Our goals are to help authors better learn and understand the publishing process and to share scholarship as broadly as possible. We work closely with authors throughout the writing and editing processes to create high-quality peer-reviewed open access publications.”

In addition to faculty projects, Virginia Tech Publishing offers students a taste of what it’s like to be a published author.

“A large part of our work has focused on student publications and creating space on campus for undergraduate and graduate students to publish their work before leaving the university,” said Guimont. “We currently support four open access student journals and have published seven, soon to be nine, student book projects. This is in addition to our portfolio of openly published faculty-authored books, journals, digital humanities projects, open textbooks, and media projects.”

Guimont is looking forward to continuing and expanding this work.

“Publishing is an important and impactful way to share scholarship with the world,” said Guimont. “Virginia Tech Publishing serves Virginia Tech’s mission to make education accessible and affordable while solving global challenges through research and outreach.”